As an avowed atheist living among a sea of believers (both locally and on the Internet), I have spent a lot of time discussing my beliefs (or lack thereof, as the case may be). The purpose of this blog is not to prove the non-existence of God or "de-convert" anybody from their faith, but simply to preserve some of these discussions and allow me to flesh them out through the process of writing them down, as well as to share them with anybody who might be interested in reading them.

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Evolution and Why Labels Don’t Matter

Theists
(especially Young Earth Creationists who deny the reality of evolution)
love to make a big deal about the emergence of species, constantly
asking for evidence of one species (or “kind”) turning into another, or
asking how the “first” member of a species could have possibly shown up
suddenly one day if it had no other member of its species to mate with,
etc. Here’s the thing that these folks either do not understand or else
choose to ignore, however:

We humans looooove
labels. We just can’t help ourselves. We have this innate burning need
to distinguish everything from everything else and give it all labels to
make sure that everybody knows what we are talking about. We have
chairs and we have beds. When somebody invents something that can be
used as both a chair and a bed, we call it a futon rather than just
admitting that “chair” and “bed” are arbitrary labels in the first
place. We label eating utensils that have tines as “forks” and eating
utensils that have bowl-like depressions as “spoons”. But then somebody
comes up with a utensil that has tines and a bowl-like
depression, and we have to come up with a new label “spork” (or
“runcible spoon,” if you prefer) because we just can’t deal with
something that contradicts our previously defined labels.

The
same is true with biology. We have “cats” and we have “dogs” and we
have “birds” and we somehow think that just because we have come up with
these labels that nature somehow cares one whit about making sure that
reality conforms with them. And, sure, it’s pretty obvious that cats and
dogs and birds are pretty distinct from each other, but things get
awfully muddy when you start labeling each individual species of cat,
dog and bird. Not to mention ape. We have arbitrarily defined “species”
as groups of animals that can interbreed with each other, but this is
simply our way of labeling things and not a hard and fast natural law.
That’s why there are things like “ring species” where one group of
animals can interbreed with a similar group living in proximity to them,
and that group can interbreed with another group that lives in
proximity to them, etc., but you eventually get to a group that can
interbreed with their closest neighbor but can not interbreed with the
original group. We then feel compelled to label the last group a
different species from the first group.

All of
this is to say that, yes, evolution is true and occurring all the time
and yes, this means that any labels we put on things with regard to
species, genus, etc., are necessarily going to be imprecise and have
gray areas and be subject to revision. Which is, of course, why it is so
ironic when some people who deny evolution claim it’s impossible for
one “kind” of animal to evolve into another “kind” over time, as if they
themselves have some infallible way of labeling things.